This evening a friend called me after she watched a news report about the ZeuS virus/bot. Here is the text I sent her and though I would share it here.
You’ll find this article on the USA Today website very interesting and educational.
http://tinyurl.com/5olver
Then take a look at the blog post I wrote back in November.
http://www.cultivatedweb.com/blog/category/online-security
It’s about rootkits and provides links to some of the preventive measures and tools you can use. Here’s what I’m using on my PC now.
Signature Based AntiVirus: BitDefender
http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-2216-en–BitDefender-Antivirus-2009.html
Behavior Based AntiVirus: Threatfire
http://www.threatfire.com/
COMODO Firewall
This is a great firewall. It monitors inbound and outbound network traffic, unlike the firewall in Windows that I’ve read only blocks inbound traffic. Think about it. If you get a virus that tries to phone home, the Windows firewall may not stop it or notify you of it. Firewalls must monitor outbound traffic too. But COMODO is almost too good. it also monitors program behavior. I get a lot of warnings about legitimate programs creating files, trying to launch another program, or accessing memory. Maybe I just have not configured it adequately yet. I suggest you may want to consider a less technically demanding firewall. Take a look at the firewalls reviewed at Top Ten Reviews and see what’s available for free at Download.com.
http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/download_firewall.html
As I mentioned, keeping ALL your software updated is an important step to thwart malicious software. I use Secunia Personal Software Inspector.
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/
I’m also running a program from TrendMicro to detect bots like the Conficker virus that’s been in the news. It’s called RUBotted. Still in beta and free but has not caused problems. Although, it does seem to be giving me a false positive on the 404 error pages (the page that you see when a page doesn’t exist) from sites hosted with IX Web Hosting. I’m working through the problem with IX and TrendMicro.
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/tools/security_tools/rubotted
Read a review here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=802
Finally, read this series of pages on “Ten free security utilities you should already be using”.
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12691_22-95490.html
This is a ton if info so take your time to work through it and be a responsible internet computer user. The fact that I’m still using these programs after about 6 months and don’t have any problems (as far as I know) is my testimonial and recommendation.
Mitch
